Lost Odyssey Review (X360)

Alright, let’s get the obvious comparisons out of the way early on. Lost Odyssey is from some of the makers of the Final Fantasy series and shares more than a few features with perhaps the most popular of all Japanese RPGs. Fortunately, the game takes the classic gameplay structure and adds its own features to craft an experience that few will want to miss. Interested yet? You should be.

Lost Odyssey focuses around an ensemble of remarkably well designed and rounded characters. Your main focus is on Kaim, a thousand year old immortal mercenary who has lost the majority of his memory. We join him in the midst of a huge mechanical/magical battle, where his presence seems to be swaying the tide of the battle, only for an immensely powerful magical force to wipe out everyone but him. Great, you think… this game will be easy if I’m immortal.

More story… then more

I have been a massive fan of Final Fantasy games since I was able to play them in the UK, but unfortunately was rather disappointed at Final Fantasy XII, mainly because of the massive change to battle systems and my disengagement from the plot. Lost Odyssey’s return to classic style then was a great relief for me, and as the game progressed it wasn’t just the gameplay of the battle system that drew me in. Being an immortal may sound all good and well, but as the game explores, all is not good if you have to watch everyone you care about die around you.

As I have already mentioned, all of the characters (of which you can have five fighting at once) are well rounded, have interesting back stories and characterise themselves uniquely. There’s Seth, the happy-go-lucky ex-pirate queen; another immortal, who obviously uses her demeanour (and memory loss) to overcome past pains. Jansen, a fast talking womanising mortal whose performance I found consistently and genuinely funny, and of course Kaim whose quiet calm emanates a feeling of age and wisdom portraying his immortal status in an interesting manner, especially compared to the usually androgynous moody teenagers that headline most J-RPGs.

Wait, where was this made again?

No doubt because of the Microsoft connection, the game has clearly been made for an English speaking audience, not least because for once the Full Motion Video sequences lip synch up to the English Language tracks. In-game Cinematics too are lip synched well, and crafted beautifully, telling the story in an addictive and powerful manner. The characters emote extremely well, and the voice acting is performed superbly. Even the standard cinematic treat of depth of field effects are present, though sometimes overused, but add a level of professionalism even when you are wandering around a city.

The aforementioned story is to be enjoyed and concentrated on. While the FMV isn’t up to the standard of the recent Final Fantasy games, they are adequate, but this doesn’t affect the general pace and narrative that takes place throughout the game. As Kaim (and later other characters with memory loss) see certain things they may trigger a memory, and recall something that happened in the past, which will allow you to see a ‘dream’ sequence. Uniquely this takes place in an animated text based story, as if it was a chapter in a book aided by sound effects and background music. While they are tempting to skip, rarely having a direct relevance to the story at hand they remain the hidden gem of the game for me, captivating me in a way that surprised even me, and filling in the backstory of various characters which leads to their comprehension and an ease in relating to them. Plus there are over 30 of them to unlock.

Attack, Magic, Item

I felt that Eternal Sonata had a super battle system, but was let down by the story. Perhaps if it weren’t for the visuals and battles I wouldn’t have slogged through the whole thing, but Lost Odyssey seems to deliver on both counts. Using a turn based system, the battles seem to be of a similar type that we are all used to, but there are many twists. The first is that when a turn starts you must choose what each of your characters are going to do during that turn, before any of the actions take place.

If you’re casting a particularly complex spell it may take you multiple turns, and generally if you’re using an item or attacking it will be quicker than one of your special skills, but the enemy’s actions are also timed into the equation. This sometimes leads to a character with low health being knocked out by an enemy before your spellcaster has managed to heal him from the previous turn and can cause both frustration and tactical advantage by using quicker actions. The immortals can of course be knocked out, and much like most RPGs, when they are all down, you’ll see the familiar Game Over screen, but tactics play an extra role in choosing whether to resurrect fallen characters since immortals will get right back up after a turn or two if there are other characters still with health.

It’s a complex one, this one

Your obvious options of changing weapons, leveling up to increase statistics and equipping different accessories that give you extra effects from being immune to status effects to being able to cast more powerful magic types (earned or purchased separately) are added to by the Ring system. Essentially these are extra accessories that can be equipped to provide extra power against certain enemy types, elemental power, more damage or inducing status effects when you attack using the character.

The twist however is that when you’re attacking a ring appears on your enemy and you must hold down the right trigger to time another ring into shrinking into the same size as the first. The closer you get, the bigger your effect, although failing entirely doesn’t penalise you other than not using the ring’s effect. Experience points for battles are hidden within the game engine, simply displaying a percentage of how close you are to the next level, and this masks the level cap system also in place.

But it’s too hard

One of the main pulls for RPG gamers is the ability to spend an hour or so leveling your characters to a stage where you can make a difficult battle much easier by spending the extra time. Lost Odyssey puts in a kind of invisible level cap in each area so that when you reach the highest level the designers want you, your experience will only gain about 1% for each enemy killed, which given the irregular random encounters (not a bad thing) and length of the battles (it takes quite some time to get through even the simplest of battles) makes power leveling a difficult thing to perform.

This does have its own benefits however, for example at a moment when your characters split up during the third (out of four) discs, the game gives you weaker enemies that still keep the same level cap, so that you can use it as a chance to quickly raise the level of your unused characters back up, regularly gaining a level at for every battle. Then of course you’ll reach the cap and consider it worth fleeing each battle, or running as fast as possible, were it not for the SP bonuses.

That’s Skill Points to you

Every battle gives you SP based on the enemies you fight, unrestricted by level, and these points are only useful to immortals. Mortals learn skills by leveling up, and their accessories give them extra skills. Immortals however learn skills by linking themselves to other characters in their party and choosing which skill to learn. When enough SP has been earned your immortal will gain the skill and you can choose which to use depending on the number of skill slots you have. Similarly accessories provide skills that can be learned in the same way, but it sometimes means that you have no accessories that are of value to your immortals so they are all unequipped.

This system serves to make your mortals very important to expand the skill base that you have, while your immortals can be crafted to use how you desire. Then there’s Guard Condition (basically a formation system that strongly defends those at the back until enough damage has been caused to the front), and the Ring Assembly system which allows you to create your own Rings based around the various ‘ingredients’ that you frequently find around the maps and from monsters. There are a tonne of different types of object to swipe items from; behind flapping posters, kicking over piles of rubble and even (my favourite) when you run up to a vase and the context sensitive icon appears bravely inviting you to ‘Probe’ it.

Good games make a happy gamer

It’s probably quite obvious now that I loved the game. Utterly immersive with some varied but generally beautiful visuals (even the intro FMV lead so well into the in-game graphics that I honestly wasn’t sure it had ended), there are of course various aspects to the game that could have been improved that stopped my demanding you rush out and purchase the game at the start of the review.

Based upon the Unreal Engine, the game’s visuals regularly suffer from frame rate inconsistencies, and despite the visual flair, sometimes splitting the screen for cinematics, and sparing no expense with the polycount of huge battles obviously takes its toll on the Xbox 360. Fortunately, in a turn based RPG this doesn’t negatively affect the gameplay but it makes you very aware that the game is pushing the limits of the system and honestly should have had more focus. Sometimes the time between save points is quite lengthy, especially after boss battles when you can have to deal with 20 minutes of (excellent) story before having the chance to save your progress, and that didn’t fare well on my dodgy machine that tends to crash with disc unaccessible errors, but at least if you die you can restart at the latest checkpoint which makes things much more fair.

Speaking of fair…

While most battles are designed to be quite fair, essentially forcing you into being at a certain level with the cap, there are occasions when this backfires and you’ll be thrust into a battle that is unreasonably difficult before you’ve worked out what your opponent is going to do. Playing through a second time makes things much easier, but it reminds me of classic boss battles where half of the challenge is remembering the attack routine to best defend it, especially when you have to make all of your choices before any action has taken place. The first ‘real’ boss is very unforgiving, but it’s worth not giving up there!

But for every frustration there are many elements of design that make you thankful to Mistwalker, the developer, for including it. When you’re running around complicated dungeon areas there is often a switch at the end to open a door for easier access to the rest of the area, meaning that if you’ve missed something, or just decide to go back to the area it becomes much quicker to navigate, and it’s this basis on making the game work how you’d want it that makes Lost Odyssey a fantastic RPG that fans of the genre should not be wary about picking up. There are some annoying sections; a by the books 'stealth' section, and even a 'run around collecting 10 objects from the area... twice in a row' segment, but the game is good enough to make you forget everything wrong with it by the end.

With one of the most engaging and mature stories that I have played in quite some time, great visuals and well designed and acted characters (not to mention Nobuo Uematsu’s expectedly brilliant soundtrack), Lost Odyssey did not let me down, despite great expectations. The odd moment of frustration, moving towards lengthy load times, shoddy frame rates and sometimes overly restrictive level cap may turn off some RPG newcomers, but if you can get past them, you’ll have an experience that will entertain you exactly how a single player video game should.